I pushed up to sit and pressed my hands together in my lap, hoping he’d keep talking.
“He fucked around. I guess he always had women on the side, but when my mom came home one night and found him balls-deep in some nineteen-year-old whore, that was it. She’d been disrespected too many times, and tried to leave him. In fact, she fucking told him she was going straight to the police to rat him and my uncle out.”
I swallowed thickly. Nineteen. A year younger than me. My pulse banged along and threatened to shake me apart. “What happened?”
His eyes had so much gravity, I couldn’t look anywhere else. His expression hardened. “My father called my uncle and had her killed before she could do it.” He stood from the dresser and stalked toward me. “For more than fifteen years, I thought she died in a car accident, but he’d been lying through his goddamn teeth the whole time.”
Vasilije dropped to his knees before me, bringing our gazes level. His pupils were dilated, announcing the drug was starting to hit him.
“He fucking took her from me,” he continued, “so I took his life from him.” He leaned forward, putting his lips against my jawline and kissed a sloppy line down my neck. “Now I’m an orphan, just like you. Alone in this big, stupid house.”
I held perfectly still as his mouth waged its assault against my skin. One attack after another, chiseling away at my ability to stay strong. If he kissed me on the lips, I kissed him back, but I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to initiate again.
“What happened to your brother?” I asked. “There are pictures of him in the house.”
He considered my statement. “Luka isn’t like us. He knew what our father did, but couldn’t pull the trigger. And now he’s so pussy-whipped, he goes wherever his girlfriend does, and she went off to med school in Baltimore.”
I had to tread carefully. Trying to get close to him too fast could make him push me away. I forced a casual tone. “Do you two talk much?”
“Not really. He’s older.” A faint scowl threatened his expression. “He’s smart, and loves to make sure people knows just how much smarter he is than them.”
Arrogance must be part of the Markovic genetic code. “Does he know you killed your father?”
“Yeah, he was there when I did it. He’d confronted our dad about the night our mom died, and when the truth came out, I couldn’t even look at either of them. My dad kept talking, saying some more bullshit lies, but I was fucking done. I pulled my gun and shot out the back of his head.”
His eyes drilled into me, and it felt like he was silently demanding I ask him. My voice fell an octave. “How did you feel after you did it?”
“Empty,” he said. “I felt nothing. Luka told me I was in shock, but fuck that.” He sat back, propping his elbow up on his bent knee. Stripped bare of all his clothes except for a pair of underwear, and in this comfortable, casual position, he still looked threatening, the same way a sleeping lion did. “Sometimes I wish my father was still alive, only so I could kill him again.”
He’d closed the window, but the temperature continued to drop, and I shivered. I’d had the same thought about Ilia more than once, and Vasilije stared back at me like he knew. Presented with all this evidence, I still refused to accept we were alike. I was a different kind of animal than he was.
Wasn’t I?
“Tell me about your mother,” he demanded.
What? “You want to know about my mother?”
He shrugged. “You don’t like talking about yourself, so I’m going to make you do it.” When I made a face, his eyebrow arrowed upward. “You want me to bend you over my lap? I bet your ass still hurts from the last time I had to persuade you.”
He was right, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “I told you, she was an opera singer.” His glare was razor sharp, and I sighed. “She had a beautiful voice. Such gorgeous tone and vibrato, which I wish I’d gotten.”
“You can’t sing?”
I skewed my lips to one side. “I can carry a tune, but my singing voice is average. My musical instrument is my mind, not my vocals.”
“How come your parents didn’t get married when she got knocked up with you?”
There were plenty of reasons to choose from. Because my father was already married with a kid. Because he lived in America. Because he was a fucking son-of-a-bitch. “My mother didn’t talk much about him, and what she had to say . . . wasn’t very nice. They were only together that one time.”
“One night stand?”
It wasn’t something I’d shared with anyone else. “I don’t think she was . . . willing.”